The truth, in the time it takes to forward a message.

Built by a newsroom, not a startup

News Intelligence is developed and owned by PIJAlance Magazine, formally the Centre for Public Interest Journalism and Accountability (PIJA), an independent Nigerian newsroom focused on public accountability, grassroots development and social justice. PIJAlance's reporting goes where the loudest coverage doesn't: governance, public finance, infrastructure, healthcare, education, human rights, security and development in Nigeria's underserved and marginalised communities.

We did not set out to build an AI company. We set out to hold power to account, and found that the same discipline had to be handed to readers directly.

That mission is PIJAlance's own founding standard: fearlessness, impactful journalism, objectivity and fairness, and relentless truth-seeking. News Intelligence is that standard, turned into something you can run yourself, on whatever has just landed in your inbox or your WhatsApp.

The challenge

Every day, millions of Nigerians receive claims they cannot easily check. A voice note says a public figure has died. A screenshot announces a new government portal. A video from another country is re-shared as if it happened down the street. By the time a newsroom publishes a fact-check, the message has already reached family groups, markets, churches and mosques, and the damage is done.

The problem is not that the truth is unavailable. It is scattered: in official statements, in trusted reporting, in fact-checks published months ago, in records most people never see. Finding it, weighing it and explaining it takes a trained journalist time that the average reader does not have.

Misinformation wins the race because checking is slow. We set out to make checking fast, without making it careless.

Speed alone is not the answer. A tool that answers quickly but guesses, or that sounds confident without showing its evidence, only adds to the noise. Any answer worth trusting has to show where it came from.

The solution News Intelligence brings

News Intelligence is an evidence-driven research and verification assistant, built by the team behind PIJAlance Magazine. You paste a claim exactly as you saw it. Within moments, it searches the open web, recent news, social media, official sources, Nigeria's fact-checking record and the PIJAlance archive, weighs every source it finds, and returns a clear verdict with the links behind it.

Every answer carries a clear note saying whether it was produced by AI or approved by a human editor. Every settled claim gets a shareable fact-check card, so the correction can travel as far as the rumour did.

Who it is for

• Anyone about to share something. Check it first, in less than a minute.
• Journalists and editors who need a fast first pass on a claim, with sources laid out for further reporting.
• Researchers, NGOs and civil society groups tracking what is circulating and what is true.
• Newsrooms that want to build checking into their own workflow, through the News Intelligence API, and other organisations such as NGOs and universities.

Where we are going

News Intelligence is in testing. Today it checks written claims, checks whether a link is safe to click, reads pages and videos claim by claim, finds documents and statistics, transcribes audio and video, and works in English, Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. With the deep research add-on it also runs Thoth, for sourced background research on a person, an organisation or a topic. It is also live on WhatsApp (0902 637 9427), and on the website it can check pictures for AI generation and trace where a picture came from. Newsrooms and organisations can already use the checker from their own tools through our API. The principle stays the same at every step: show the evidence, or don't make the claim.